Changes made at state-run facilities

-Continuation of medications is part of new policy.

-Continuation of medications is part of new policy.

November 17, 2005

Greater parental involvement and a change in medication policies have taken place over the past two months at the South Bend Juvenile Correctional Facility. J. David Donahue, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Correction, discussed the changes during an interview last week in South Bend, where he was attending a community corrections conference at Ivy Tech Community College. The juvenile correctional facility is a state-run prison on Old Cleveland Road, north of the South Bend Regional Airport. Teenage boys are sentenced there to serve time for status offenses such as truancy, as well as more serious offenses including burglary and robbery that would be considered felonies if committed by adults. The facility is known colloquially as boys school, and the inmates are referred to as students. The South Bend facility was one of three juvenile lockups examined last year by the U.S. Department of Justice after allegations of mistreatment of the boys. The other two were the Plainfield Juvenile Correctional Facility, which recently was transformed into an adult prison, and the Logansport Intake/Diagnostic Facility. Donahue said changes are under way throughout the juvenile justice facilities in Indiana. One of the issues in the DOJ report concerned safety and the assaults of inmates. Donahue said more security cameras have been added to minimize blind spots that were out of view of the guards and surveillance cameras. Video cameras also are being used now, Donahue said, to document the behavior of the juvenile offenders. Staff members recently were trained to use the cameras to monitor emotionally upset children. Donahue said video has been used that way for some time now in the adult prisons but are an innovation in the juvenile facilities. Information can be shared with Child Protective Services and other agencies that deal with troubled youths, he added. Also new for the staff, Donahue said, is the requirement that the teachers offer parent-teacher conferences. He said the idea occurred to him while he was attending such a conference for his own son. He was surprised to find out that similar meetings were not conducted in the juvenile facilities. Absolutely nothing is more important than involving parents in their children's education and development, Donahue said. The DOJ report also was critical of the DOC's policy of discontinuing behavior-modifying drugs. All youths go through an intake process at Logansport, and the staff there routinely was stopping the use of drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder and other mental health problems. Parents were extremely critical of the practice because the cutting off of drugs often caused their sons to exhibit disruptive behavior that impeded their progress. Donahue said the practice has been stopped. Boys who are taking psychotropic drugs when they arrive at intake are kept on the medications now, he said. In some cases, medications have been changed after evaluation by the medical staff, he said. The medical staff is looking at the boys who don't do well on their medications to see whether other factors are affecting their behavior, he said. Finally, Donahue addressed a report that had been circulating that Camp Summit might close in LaPorte County. It will not be closed or changed, he said. The facility is the state's only boot camp for boys, he said. A study is under way to see whether the camp's mission is meeting its objectives. The state hasn't measured the camp's effectiveness in the past, he said, but he has asked for it to be studied and quantified. Nancy J. Sulok's columns appear on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. You can reach her at nsulok@sbtinfo.com, or by writing c/o South Bend Tribune, 225 W. Colfax Ave., South Bend, IN 46626, telephone (574) 235-6234.